Former USTA president to tell her story at WIN for Columbia luncheon

Monday

Katrina Adams has her two brothers to thank for her career in tennis — a career that for a time made her the sport’s most powerful figure in the United States.

The funny thing is, Adams’ brothers don’t even like tennis. The entirety of their careers took place within a six-week summer tennis camp at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boys & Girls club on the west side of Chicago in the mid-1970s.

Adams was 6 years old. Her parents weren’t tennis players, either, but they were busy teaching summer school, so Adams went with her brothers. She smacked a volley over the net and was hooked for life.

“I played the sport purely for the love of the sport,” Adams said, “and I loved to compete.”

Tuesday afternoon, Adams will tell her story in Columbia. She is set to be the keynote speaker at the Women’s Intersport Network (WIN) for Columbia luncheon at the Southwell Complex on the campus of Columbia College.

The luncheon, now in its 22nd year, will honor a number of the area’s prominent women in sports, including the youth athlete of the year, mentor of the year, and high school and collegiate athletes of the year.

Adams is a worthy role model. The NCAA doubles champion, 12-year pro and immediate past president of the United States Tennis Association doesn’t yield to barriers. When she was named the USTA president in 2015, Adams became the first former pro, the first African-American and the youngest person to ever hold the job.

“I always end up doing things by happenstance,” Adams said. “I’ve always been a person that wanted to lead in anything that I did.”

Her fortuitous introduction to tennis at the Boys & Girls Club eventually led Adams to a successful junior career. Her first major tournament was ATA Nationals in 1976, and while there she met another tennis dynamo about her age in Zina Garrison. Five years later, Garrison was the No. 1 junior in the world.

Adams kept in contact with Garrison while she continued her tennis career at Northwestern, a happy byproduct of simply excelling at the sport she loved.

“I competed throughout my junior career and later realized you could actually earn a college scholarship. It wasn’t something I knew when I picked up the sport, unlike the kids of today,” Adams said. “My journey is quite different from the modern player because I really enjoyed playing and competing.”

Adams excelled at Northwestern, too, joining the lineup immediately as a freshman and winning the NCAA doubles championship as a sophomore with Diane Donnelly.

She would have returned in the No. 1 doubles pairing and as the No. 3 singles player in the country for her junior year, until her college coach, Sandy Stap Clifton, brought up another possibility. Clifton asked Adams if she was going to go pro to figure out how many open scholarships she’d have the next season.

Adams decided to take the first few weeks of the fall semester to try out the pro circuit, entering in tournaments as an amateur to maintain her college eligibility. She wound up qualifying for the Australian Open that next January.

It wasn’t her first experience at a Grand Slam — Adams’ NCAA championship qualified her for the U.S. Open two years prior. But that was Adams’ first experience there as a professional, and she took note of her surroundings: how professionals played, how professionals acted, how professionals ate.

“Coming out of college, it was Domino's Pizza and beer for me,” Adams said. … “Just to be in that environment and soak it up, watch players, watch matches and learn, it was an incredible experience that I was able to carry forward to be a better player.”

Not long after Adams turned pro, she got a call from another player’s coach asking her to be a doubles partner. It was Garrison, who at that point was a top-10 doubles player in the world.

Adams was floored. Their first tournament together was the Virginia Slims of Boca Raton, which they won. The pair ended up winning seven tournaments together between 1988-95. By the end of her career in 1998, Adams had won 20 pro doubles tournaments.

When her playing career wound down, Adams started looking for other options and began to research the USTA’s work in grassroots tennis. She joined the USTA Board of Directors in 2005 under its “elite athlete” provision, then when that allowance expired, she was appointed to the board as a member of the general public in 2011. Four years later, she was the USTA president.

Adams said one of her primary goals as president was to increase diversity in the sport in an effort to make “tennis look like America” from a demographics standpoint. That led to a major effort to bring tennis to the Hispanic community, and in Adams’ tenure Hispanic membership in the USTA grew 12 percent.

“Having had the experiences I did in the sport — coming from the west side of Chicago, playing juniors, high school, college, professional — I had covered the gamut as to who the USTA represented and I epitomized everything that we strived for within the organization,” Adams said. “For me it was about enhancing opportunities for everyone.”

Adams served two consecutive terms as president. Her second term ended Jan. 1, though she remains the executive director for the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education Program — a position she has held since 2005. She’s also eager to return to her work as a television commentator, which she started doing in 2003.

These days, a sore knee prevents her from playing much longer than 20 minutes at a time. But Adams is optimistic that after surgery this year she’ll be back on the court by fall.

What’s another barrier to break down, anyway?

djones@columbiatribune.com

573-815-1787

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